This is the seventh installment of an exploration of some of
the possible futures discussed on this blog, using the toolkit of narrative
fiction. Our narrator visits a streetcar factory, asks some hard questions
about the use of human labor in place of machines, and gets some answers he
doesn’t expect...
***********
The phone rang at 8 am sharp, a shrill mechanical sound that
made me wonder if there was actually a bell inside the thing. I put down the
Toledo Blade and got it on the second ring. “Hello?”
“Mr. Carr? This is Melanie Berger. I’ve got—well, not
exactly good news, but it could be worse.”
I laughed. “Okay, I’ll bite. What’s up?”
“We’ve managed to get everyone to sit down and work out a
compromise, but the President’s got to be involved in that. With any luck this
whole business will be out of the way by this afternoon, and he’ll be able to
meet with you this evening, if that’s acceptable.”
“That’ll be fine,” I said.
“Good. In the meantime, we thought you might want to make
some of the visits we discussed with your boss earlier. If that works for you—”
“It does.”
“Can you handle being shown around by an intern? He’s a bit
of a wooly lamb, but well-informed.” I indicated that that would be fine, and
she went on. “His name’s Michael Finch. I can have him meet you at the Capitol
Hotel lobby whenever you like.”
“Would half an hour from now be too soon?”
“Not at all. I’ll let him know.”
We said the usual polite things, and I hung up. Twenty-five
minutes later I was down in the lobby, and right on time a young man in a
trenchcoat and a fedora came through the doors. I could see why Berger had
called him a wooly lamb; he had blond curly hair and the kind of permanently
startled expression you find most often in interns, ingenues, and axe
murderers. He looked around blankly even though I was standing in plain sight.
“Mr. Finch?” I said, crossing the lobby toward him. “I’m
Peter Carr.”
His expression went even more startled than usual for a
moment, and then he grinned. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Carr. You surprised me—I was expecting to see
someone dressed in that plastic stuff.”
“I’m not fond of being stared at,” I said with a shrug.
He nodded, as though that explained everything. “Ms. Berger
told me you wanted to visit some of our industrial plants and the Toledo stock
market. Unless you have something already lined up, we can head down to the
Mikkelson factory first and go from there. We could take a cab if you like, or
just catch the streetcar—the Green line goes within a block of the plant.
Whatever you like.”
I considered that, decided that a good close look at
Lakeland public transit was in order. “Let’s catch the streetcar.”
“Sure thing.”
We left the lobby, and I followed Finch’s lead along the
sidewalk to the right. The morning was crisp and bright, with an edge of frost,
and plenty of people were walking to work. A fair number of horsedrawn cabs
rolled by, along with a very few automobiles. I thought about that as we
walked. Toledo’s tier had a base date of 1950, or so the barber told me the day
before, but I didn’t think that cars were anything like so scarce on American
streets in that year.
We turned right and came to the streetcar stop, where a
dozen people were already waiting. I turned to Finch. “The Mikkelson factory.
What do they make?”
For answer he pointed up the street. Two blocks up, the front end of a streetcar was coming into
sight as it rounded the corner. “Rolling stock for streetcar lines. We’ve got
three big streetcar manufacturers in the Republic, but Mikkelson’s the biggest.
The Toledo system runs their cars exclusively.”
The streetcar finished the turn, sped up, and rolled to a
stop in front of us. Strictly speaking, I suppose I should say “streetcars,”
since there were four cars linked together, all of them painted forest green
and yellow with brass trim. We lined up with the others, climbed aboard when
our turn came, and Finch pushed a couple of bills down into the fare box and
got a couple of paper slips—“day passes,” he explained—from the conductor.
There were still seats available, and I settled into the window seat as the
conductor rang a bell, ding-di-ding-di-ding, and the streetcar hummed into
motion.
It was an interesting ride, in an odd way. I travel a lot,
like most people in my line of work, and I’ve ridden top-of-the-line automated
light rail systems in New Beijing and Brasilia. I could tell at a glance that
the streetcar I was on cost a small fraction of the money that went into those
high-end systems, but the ride was just as comfortable and nearly as fast.
There were two employees of the streetcar system on board, a driver and a
conductor, and I wondered how much of the labor cost was offset by the lower
price of the hardware.
The streetscape rolled past. We got out of the retail
district near my hotel and into a residential district, with a mix of apartment
buildings and row houses and a scattering of other buildings: an elementary
school with a playground outside, a public library, two churches, a couple of
other religious buildings of various kinds, and then a big square building with
a symbol above the door I recognized at once. I turned to Finch. “I wondered
whether there were Atheist Assemblies here.”
“Oh, yes. Are you an Atheist, Mr. Carr?”
I didn’t see any reason to temporize. “Yes.”
“Wonderful! So am I. If you’re free this coming Sunday,
you’d be more than welcome at the Capitol Assembly—that’s this one here.” He
motioned at the building we were passing.
“I’ll certainly consider it,” I said, and he beamed.
By the time we got to the factory the streetcar was crammed
to the bursting point, mostly with people who looked like office staff, and the
sidewalks were full of men and women heading toward the factory gates for the
day shift. We got off with almost everyone else, and I followed Finch down
another sidewalk to the front entrance of the business office, a sturdy-looking
two-story structure with MIKKELSON MANUFACTURING in big letters above the
second story windows and in gold paint on the glass of the front door.
The receptionist was already on duty, and picked up a
telephone to announce us. A few minutes later a middle-aged woman in a dark
suit came out to shake our hands. “Mr. Carr, pleased to meet you. I’m Elaine
Chu. So you’d like to see our factory?”
A few minutes later we’d exchanged our hats, coats and
jackets for safety helmets and loose coveralls of tough gray cloth. “Just under
half the streetcars manufactured in the Lakeland Republic are made right here,”
Chu explained as we walked down a long corridor. “We’ve also got plants in
Louisville and Rockford, but those supply the railroad industry—Rockford makes
locomotives and Louisville’s our plant for rolling stock. Every Mikkelson
streetcar comes from this plant.”
We passed through double doors onto the shop floor. I was
expecting a roar of machine noise, but there weren’t a lot of machines, just
workers in the same gray coveralls we were wearing, picking up what looked like
hand tools and getting to work. There were streetcar tracks running down the
middle of the shop floor, and I watched as a team of workers bolted two wheels,
an axle, and a gear together and sent it rolling down the track to the next
team. Metal parts clanged and clattered, voices echoed off the metal girders
that held up the roof, and now and then some part got pulled from the line and
chucked into a big cart on its own set of tracks.
“Quality control,” Chu said. “Each team checks each part or
assembly as it comes down the line, and anything that’s not up to spec gets
pulled and either disassembled or recycled. That’s one of the reasons we have
so large a share of the market. Our streetcars average twenty per cent less
downtime for repairs than anybody else’s.”
We followed the wheel assemblies down the shop floor from
the team that assembled them into four-wheel bogies, through the teams that
built a chassis with electric motors and wiring atop each pair of bogies, to
the point where the body was hauled in on a heavily-built overhead suspension
track and bolted onto the chassis. From there we went back up another long
corridor to the assembly line that built the bodies. It was all a hum of
activity, with dozens of tools I didn’t recognize at all, but every part of it
was powered by human muscle and worked by human hands.
I think we’d been there for about two hours when we got to
the end of the line, and watched a brand new Mikkelson streetcar get hooked up
to overhead power lines, tested one last time, and driven away on tracks to the
siding where it would be loaded aboard a train and shipped to its
destination—Sault Ste. Marie, Chu explained, which was expanding its streetcar
system now that the borders were open and trade with Upper Canada had the local
economy booming. “So that’s the line from beginning to end,” she said. “If
you’d like to come this way?”
We went back into the business office, shed helmets and
coveralls, and proceeded to her office. “I’m sure you have plenty of
questions,” she said.
“One in particular,” I replied. “The lack of automation.
Nearly everything you do with human labor gets done in other industrial
countries by machines. I’m curious as to how that works—economically as well as
practically—and whether it’s a matter of government mandates or of something
else.”
I gathered from her expression that she was used to the
question. “Do you have a background in business, Mr. Carr?”
I nodded, and she went on. “In the Atlantic Republic, if I
understand correctly—and please let me know if I’m wrong—when a company spends
money to buy machines, those count as assets; that’s how they appear on the
books, and there are tax benefits from depreciation and so on. When a company
spends the same money to do the same task by hiring employees, they don’t count
as assets, and you don’t get any of the same benefits. Is that correct?”
I nodded again.
“On the other hand, if a company hires employees, it has to
spend much more than the cost of wages or salaries. It has to pay into the
public social security system, public health care, unemployment, and so on and
so forth, for each person it hires. If the company buys machines instead, it
doesn’t have to pay any of those things for each machine. Nor is there any kind
of tax to cover the cost to society of replacing the jobs that went away
because of automation, or to pay for any increased generating capacity the
electrical grid might need to power the machines, or what have you. Is that
also correct?”
“Essentially, yes,” I said.
“So, in other words, the tax codes subsidize automation and
penalize employment. You probably were taught in business school that
automation is more economical than hiring people. Did anyone mention all the
ways that public policy contributes to making one more economical than the
other?”
“No,” I admitted. “I suppose you do things differently
here.”
“Very much so,” she said with a crisp nod. “To begin with,
if we hire somebody to do a job, the only cost to Mikkelson Manufacturing is
the wages or salary, and any money we put into training counts as a credit
against other taxes, since that helps give society in general a better trained
work force. Social security, health care, the rest of it, all of that comes out
of other taxes—it’s not funded by penalizing
employers for hiring people.”
“And if you automate?”
“Then the costs really start piling up. First off, there’s a
tax on automation to pay the cost to society of coping with an increase in
unemployment. Then there’s the cost of machinery, which is considerable, and
then there’s the natural-resource taxes—if it comes out of the ground or goes
into the air or water, it’s taxed, and not lightly, either. Then there’s the
price of energy. Electricity’s not cheap here; the Lakeland Republic has only a
modest supply of renewable energy, all things considered, and it hasn’t got any
fossil fuels to speak of, so the only kind of energy that’s cheap is the kind
that comes from muscles.” She shook her head. “If we tried to automate our
assembly line, the additional costs would break us. It’s a competitive
business, and the other two big firms would eat us alive.”
“I suppose you can’t just import manufactured products from
abroad.”
“No, the natural-resource taxes apply no matter what the
point of origin is. You may have noticed that there aren’t a lot of cars on the
streets here.”
“I did notice that,” I said.
“Fossil fuels here don’t get the government subsidies here
they get almost everywhere else, and there’s the natural-resource taxes on top
of that, for the fuel that’s burnt and the air that’s polluted. You can have a
car if you want one, but you’ll pay plenty for the privilege, and you’ll pay
even more for the fuel if you want to drive it.”
I nodded; it all made a weird sort of sense, especially when
I thought back to some of the other things I’d heard earlier. “So nobody’s
technology gets a subsidy,” I said.
“Exactly. Here in the Lakeland Republic, we’re short on
quite a few resources, but one thing there’s no shortage of is people who are
willing to put in an honest day’s work for an honest wage. So we use the resource
we’ve got in abundance, rather than becoming dependent on things we don’t
have.”
“And would have to import from abroad.”
“Exactly. As I’m sure you’re aware, Mr. Carr, that involves
considerable risks.”
